


The Problem of Sakura

by m_peridot



Series: implications of a civilian mindset [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Haruno Sakura-centric, Psychological Horror, Surrealism, but i swear it's not as bad a you think?, no beta we die like Itachi, these tags look bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:41:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26144287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_peridot/pseuds/m_peridot
Summary: “There must be something else wrong with you, something that Hokage-sama, that I, can’t quite grasp. Otherwise you wouldn’t have damned yourself like that, leaving the village and all that it stands for. I mean, all your precious people are still in Konoha; only you are excluded by choice.”Sakura defects and tries not to think about it. (Spoiler alert: it doesn't work.)Inspired by "The Problem of Susan" by Neil Gaiman
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Hatake Kakashi, Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto
Series: implications of a civilian mindset [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1898506
Comments: 4
Kudos: 55





	The Problem of Sakura

**Author's Note:**

> This is heavily based on the short story "The Problem of Susan" - to the point where I lift certain images wholesale from the original. If you haven't read it, you may want to, because this fic will probably not in any way be what you expect. However I understand that that type of surrealist horror is not for everyone. You might find it weird and disturbing (actually, if you don’t find it weird and disturbing, I fear for your mental state), and it’s not necessary to read this fic, so… ultimately, it’s up to you, dear reader.
> 
> I do hope you enjoy.

She has the dream again that night.

In the dream, she is standing, with her teammates, on the edge of the battlefield. (Battlefield is disingenuous: call it what it is, an inglorious massacre, slaughtering vermin.) 

It is summer, and the forest is a peculiarly vivid shade of green: a wholesome green, as if brought into existence by the Mokuton mere seconds before. The vibrancy is too much, oppressive in its presentness and judgement, and she is reminded uncomfortably of the complete praise and adoration through which the First Hokage was taught; the devotion on her teachers’ faces ringing the gong of insanity. She is reminded of taking the oath and feeling the benevolent gaze of both the visage of the dead First and still living Third as she knelt uncomfortably to proclaim her loyalty. There is something dreadful in that memory, but she cannot seem to grasp it. 

There are bodies on the undergrowth. None of the bodies are shinobi; it had been one of the inane eradication missions—they are still genin and must become used to blooding their hands on easy targets. (They began with fish in their first year, then in their last, before graduation, they’d been given rabbits. She remembers choosing a pure white one, forgetting for a moment that that would make it worse, that she should have chosen one who’s fur would not show the crimson stain of her wrongdoing.) She can see a bandit, his throat slit, on the ground near her. Her hand trembles around the kunai, oddly wet and slick in her grip. His skin is nut-brown from sun and grimy with the dust and dirt from the road. She finds herself staring at the open mouth and then the lips, oddly red and full, wondering about the days spent in ambush and the hit and runs, imagines being kissed by that bearded face, hands slipping down, caressing skin. Her eyes flick to the cut throat, and the sticky red-black pool that surrounds it, and she shivers.

Flies buzz around the corpses

The flowers tangle in the growth; she can tell the lethal ones from the others. (Remembers, in a fit of fancy, the kunoichi classes that she used to love, playing with toxic beauty the same careless way she had played with dolls that she never named.) Some are crushed underfoot, ground into the less beautiful greenery, the stalks broken and oozing the sticky, pearl droplets. They had remained undisturbed for, how long? A week? A month? A year? She does not know.

All this was still, she thinks, as she looks at the battlefield. Yesterday, all this was without human presence. Her whiskered teammate tugs her hand and points. Near the edge of the clearing, Kakashi saws off the head of the leader. He is apathetic, as he always, always is, visible eye half-lidded. The fine mist of blood does not disturb him, and she knows that in the morning, he will look as impeccable as ever. None of today will remain: erased as the lives of the petty criminals in that clearing. The genin, however, cannot stay unaffected. Sasuke is even quieter, his eyes tighten momentarily. Naruto’s plastic smile is back, and the dissonance between his beaming face and the carnage of the messy, inexperienced kills is jarring.

In her dream she notices these things.

Their sensei will finish his task soon, will seal the grotesque head…. There are things about herself that Sakura despises. Her hair, for example. The pink strands are brittle and rough, never silky-soft like the other kunoichi who choose to keep their hair long, and for this she cannot forgive herself, so on waking, she showers, using chakra to heat the water and, naked and towel-dried, runs a few products, all scentless to minimize the risk, through her hair. It is, she believes, her sole extravagance.

Today she straps on all her gear: the kunai and shuriken that she has so recently bought, the poison-tipped senbon hidden in her gloves and in her hair, the explosive tags in an easily accessible pouch. She thinks of this outfit as her serious outfit, as opposed to the naïvety of her youth or the civilian clothes she wears when she wants to disappear. Now that she is past the median age of shinobi survival (most die too young, their world’s harsh reality consuming their lives in the same way the Kyuubi decimated Konoha), she wears the civilian mask more and more. She puts on her pack.

After breakfast, she shunshins to the hunter’s outpost. She discovers that a fairly arrogant, probably new, nin is there, waving and gesturing as he speaks loudly, obnoxiously, a head and an amputated hand on the countertop next to him. The crimson liquid pools and stains the wood. It looks like the dead bounty is drowning, as though the rest of his non-existent body is submerged in wood, in the same way Yamato used to phase through the forest. She purses her lips and takes out a body scroll, deftly unrolling it and sealing the whole mess. The woman manning the station nods tersely at her and and turns to stare disapprovingly at the new nin. When he moves to protest her actions, Sakura flicks a kunai at him. He doesn’t even have time to move, and it pins him to the wall through his shirt and cuts off a few strands of hair that then drift lazily to the ground. He gulps and shuts up. She turns back to the woman behind the counter, who hands her a small black book. She walks out and once up in a tree several miles away, pulls it out and flips to the captured and killed section at the end of the book. 

She does not actually expect to encounter anyone she knows there, but the world is small, and she observes that, perhaps with cruel humour, they have run a photograph of Akamine Rei from before he defected, and not at all as he was the last time Sakura had last seen him, in a bar at the edge of the Land of Rivers, scarred from countless fights and a grim, forbidding countenance. He had been awaiting death; it was in the terrible steadiness of his hands as they threw back drink after drink, and Sakura can no longer feel the slightest loss, only the terrible emptiness—he, after all, got what he wanted. In the photograph, he is very young. He looks too cocky by half, still devoured by that fanatical spirit of devotion. He was the one who had introduced her to Xi, her first and only partner after her departure. They had worked well together. He had asked her to stay, and she is no longer certain why she said no, or even if she had declined that offer. He was a pleasant-enough young man, jaded and shrewd with the thin veneer of politeness, beautiful in action—a work of art. She remembers his fingertips; the fire they traced on the back of her neck, and maybe that was why she left—too much vivacity… she senses approaching shinobi and slips off to meet them. Sakura has been aching for a fight (like an addict desperate for a fix), and they seem strong enough to pose somewhat of a threat.

Her first thought is how young the girl looks.

Her first thought is how old the woman looks. In the corner of her eye she sees Taicho, a gaping wound in between his third and fourth rib, and she _knows_ that it’s fatal, and she _knows_ that the others in her squad are much the same, but that realization is distant in the face of the woman on top of her – the lurid pink hair and a seal on her forehead, the immense strength… She is only a rookie, barely accepted into ANBU and yet, here she is, at her first meeting with an S-class nukenin. And not just any nukenin, but Haruno Sakura; _Fleeting Life (Ukiyo no Hime)_ they call her, and she can only think of cherry blossoms.

Suddenly, she feels an urge to introduce herself to her killer. “Haruno Sakura-san? I’m Hayashi Ari.”

The nukenin just looks at her, and she feels like a fool, unbalanced and deeply disturbed at herself. She decides, with finality, that she is in shock (or finally broken), and by the time she is no longer in shock, she will be dead.

So she continues.

“You know, your story used to make me so angry.”

“What did?”

“Your deflection. Your teammates returned, your sensei stayed, your friends remained loyal to the Leaf, but you? You as a kunoichi, no, _the_ kunoichi of the vaunted Team Seven, _you left_. You were weak, and to some extent that affected me too. Whenever I fell behind or was excluded, it was to the assumption that kunoichi were weak.”

She is rambling now, ranting about a trivial thing that she doesn’t truly care about (that she hasn’t felt angry about since her chuunin days), but this is her deathbed, and _kami_ , it feels good to vent. She would leave the subject, but the pink haired woman quirks an eyebrow, and that is all the encouragement she needs.

“Hokage-sama believes that his teammate still has time, that even though you betrayed the village, as long as you live, you still have time to repent.”

“Repent what?” The voice was soft, pointed as the senbon poised over her throat.

“Not believing in him, I suppose, not believing in his dream.”

The older woman simply hums, sounding a bit bored.

“There must be something else wrong with you, something that Hokage-sama, that I, can’t quite grasp. Otherwise you wouldn’t have damned yourself like that, leaving the village and all that it stands for. I mean, all your precious people are still in Konoha; only you are excluded by choice.”

Or maybe, she thinks with a giggle, she’s been poisoned. It would explain her lack of filter, the breakdown of the ANBU training and her emotionless mask.

“I don’t know what you want to believe, but remaining behind would also have meant shackles and a leash always in reach of the Hokage’s arm. How many of _his_ dreams have been actualized? But I digress…”

She sighs, breath warm on Ari’s cheeks, and Ari shivers.

“I suppose you’ve never had to assign missions.”

It is a statement, not a question, but Ari still replies with a negative.

“That’s a blessing. I had my first failure at fourteen—Tsunade-shishou was drunk and Shizune-san was at the hospital leading reforms, so it fell to me as the Hokage’s assistant. That whole week I was terrified, tense, what if I’d made a mistake, what if I was _wrong_ , a miscalculation. I was right. I had erred, and when his relatives came up to the mission room and spat in my face, I wondered what gave a village the power to dictate the lives of its shinobi through a sheaf of papers. It hadn’t even been a particularly important mission, a mission that we could have ignored, just decided not to take… Then it happened to me, and I obeyed, and obeyed, and obeyed, and it didn’t seem to end, did it?”

Sakura trails off. She hadn’t meant to say so much, and she has a chagrined look on her face as she realizes the airborne poison has affected her, however slightly. The words have already faded, their truth becoming muddled with the acrid taste of falsity. The body underneath her grows limp, the heart no longer incessantly pulling against the tug of death, and all is silent again.

That night, Sakura climbs up the side of a tree, slowly, painstakingly, limbs aching from the brutal workout she has made herself do after the encounter with Hayashi. She sets traps, because no matter how tired she is, safety will always be a the forefront of her mind, and slips into her sleeping bag, taking off only half of her gear and laying it to the side.

She takes a waterproof bag from her pack and, lying in the trees, not quite comfortable, but willing herself to bear it, she looks at the photographs, chakra enhancing the sight the sliver of moonlight that reaches through the leaves gives her. She looks at her sun and her stars and wonders how they could ever have been that young, how anyone could ever be that young. 

The moonlight is cold, like snow, a white shivering that lightly touches the photos and Sakura inadvertently shudders, and the events of her childhood, of Konoha, seem far too far away, overridden with a distance that she cannot cross. A shadow crosses the pictures and suddenly they seem menacing, the bright smiles and the stoic eyes turn odd and deranged, chaotic as her carefully tucked away emotions, because as much as she left Konoha, she has never left them. 

Sakura falls into slumber and dreams anew.

In the dream, Kakashi is crossing the corpse-ridden clearing toward her team, slouch in place and uncaring of them and of himself. She is standing on the battlefield, holding her teammate’s hand. She looks up at her scarecrow sensei, sees both his visible abyss and the red demonic eye, which if uncovered mean hell, and whispers to Naruto, in a flash of comprehension, “ _He’s a_ shinobi _, isn’t he”_ and they shiver.

But as she comprehends, Kakashi, with the same carelessness and easy arrogance as the new hunter at the outpost, slices off her head with a white chakra saber. She cannot run, she cannot move, for Kakashi was a shinobi, and always faster. The rest of her body disappears except for her head and her left hand, which are left to stay barely above the crimson tide.

She wishes that he had destroyed her head, then she would not have had to look. Dead eyelids cannot be closed, and she stares, unflinching, at the twisted thing her boys have become. Sasuke stands frozen, an expression of deep malice distorting his features, the Sharingan with its prefect recall constructing a scene only he can see. The Sannin Orochimaru slithers out from behind and caresses Sasuke’s cheek, opening his mouth so that it falls, unhinged and large enough to swallow the Avenger and all his ambitions whole. 

Naruto runs to the Sandaime, calling _“Jiji”_ but grasps at mist; before he can mourn, blank masked agents smother him and Danzo comes, tapping his cane, which echoes as though they were in the Council chambers instead of the soft ground of the forest. He unwraps his arm and the demonic red swirls and swirls, and Naruto’s chest cavity unfolds like a flower, flesh peeling back bit by bit, rivets of blood over glistening flesh and the corrupted chakra burns even Sakura, dead as she is, still burns, skin scalded off. The sun screams, a long drawn-out _wail_ of horror and loss, as it splits open and pours its golden innards out onto the vibrant grass.

The Fox awakes, and the malice is palpable. First it devours its host, running its tongue through its teeth after it finishes, and then it turns to Sakura, ambles over to the head on the grass, and takes it in its huge mouth, crunching her skull in its powerful jaws, and it is then, only then, that she wakes.

Her breath comes in erratic bursts and she receives no more sleep that night.

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, I really didn't want to publish this until I was... more satisfied with it I guess. But I admit that I probably won't ever been fully satisfied with it - after all, I wrote it in late 2018 and it really hasn't changed much since then. Also I made the decision to post it partly because PDRH is currently facing a huge writer's block. I'm pretty sure I know where I want to go with the story, it's just... not manifesting.
> 
> Anyhow, this story was born out of my fascination with Sakura's civilian status (yes i'm gonna ignore that canonically her parents were shinobi - because honestly, if they were, they must have... not taught her anything?) she really is the most like the average "modern" person - horrified by violence, weak, lacking a clear goal. I feel like this is honestly how most of us would react if shoved into the Naruto world. I wanted to explore her as a character who was civilian first and foremost and who slowly shifted her priorities and beliefs into something more shinobi-like while retaining a lot of civilian characteristics. I guess that's where I'm not as satisfied with this one-shot. 
> 
> Also this fic is wildly ooc and I'm gonna embrace that.


End file.
